At first the stereotype careened around the decks and parlors of British and French ships, for American liners, operating under the American flag and American law, went dry when the rest of the country did. Unlike the rest of the country, though, U.S.-registered ships were dry in fact as well as in name. The drop-off in business was so precipitous they might as well have slammed into a field of icebergs. A correspondent for the New York Tribune, describing a voyage on the President Harding, wrote, “It hurt [the crew] to think Americans deserted them to go on foreign lines merely because they could not, as one officer remarked, ‘wait seven days for a drink.’”
It hurt the shipping industry even more, an insistent pain that led to a government agency’s willful defiance of the Eighteenth Amendment. For a brief period American ships relaxed the rules, at the direction of Albert Lasker, the Chicago advertising executive (and majority owner of the Chicago Cubs) who headed the U.S. Shipping Board. A federal agency established to subsidize the American shipping industry, which had not recovered from the world war, the board seemed to believe that ignoring the Volstead Act was a more promising course of action than seeking additional appropriations from a chronically parsimonious Congress. Ads in the Paris edition of the New York Herald for the liners George Washington and America soon proclaimed “Excellent Cuisine—Choice Wines and Liquor.” Menus distributed on board offered a choice of six different clarets, four champagnes, five liqueurs, and nine varieties of hard liquor, including an anonymous “American rye” priced 20 percent higher than Haig & Haig, Jameson, Johnnie Walker, or any of the other imported brands.
Lasker’s policy was soon torpedoed by August A. Busch, son of Adolphus. Any Busch without power—Prohibition had rendered the family politically irrelevant—was a very unhappy Busch indeed. This one channeled his peevishness into mischief making. After a trip on the George Washington, he said he had “never seen so great a consumption of liquor as during this particular voyage”—proving, he asserted, that the U.S. government was “incomparably the biggest bootlegger in the world.” Busch made this declaration in a letter sent to Warren G. Harding, then distributed it nearly as widely as he had once distributed beer.
Busch was no more concerned about booze on ships than he would have been had passengers been caught playing shuffleboard for nickels. His goals were more complex: he wanted to embarrass the Harding administration, discredit the Eighteenth Amendment, and, while he was at it, stick a knife into his old enemies, the distilling interests. But in the process he provoked the interest of Wayne B. Wheeler, who perceived an opportunity. Waving a series of ancient Supreme Court decisions involving maritime law in front of Congress and the White House, Wheeler showed that his political muscles had not atrophied. In October 1922 Harding declared American ships permanently dry and simultaneously announced that foreign ships coming into U.S. ports also had to be free of liquor.
At first the British were dismissive. “If the measure came into operation,” a shipping executive said two days after Harding’s announcement, “. . . our British ships would be governed by the United States—and such a state of affairs could not be tolerated.” Then the British turned angry, and Parliament considered legislation that would have made it mandatory for American ships to have liquor aboard if they wished to use British ports. But the final phase of the British response was acceptance, and for a time westbound Cunard and White Star liners, when they approached the three-mile limit off Long Island, would pause to dump into the sea any alcoholic beverages that hadn’t been downed by passengers and crew. When Lord Curzon finally agreed to stretch the three-mile limit, the American quid for the British quo granted British ships the right to bring liquor into American ports, so long as it was secured under seal. “Is it possible that any civilized country could continue to occupy the position now occupied by the United States?” asked Thomas Royden, chairman of the Cunard Line. He quickly found his own answer: transatlantic Volsteadism, he said, “renders [the United States] ridiculous in the eyes of the world.” Senator James W. Wadsworth, an aristocratic wet from upstate New York, was even harsher: “How the world must despise us for making such asses of ourselves.”
Things worked out fine for the British and other foreign ships. Although they had to put stoppers in their bottles and locks on their storerooms when they came within twelve miles of the United States, they otherwise remained free to host the floating revels for 99.6 percent of the journey across the ocean. The dehydrated American liners, for their part, were compelled to promote other virtues. Thus did Albert Lasker attempt to win the attention of transatlantic travelers by setting up driving ranges on the aft decks of American ships, by showing first-run movies, by bringing aboard name-brand orchestras, and by offering unlimited caviar to first-class passengers.
All these innovations survived the end of Prohibition. One other did not. The Coca-Cola company, seeing a possible opening, had designed a handsome new bottle, its neck wrapped in foil to resemble champagne. Coke’s foreign department hoped it would replace the genuine article at bon voyage parties and shipboard banquets. But American travelers, by then wise to the ways of secreting bottles in their luggage, were never again without access to the truly real Real Thing. They just took it aboard with them.
EIGHT DECADES OF MOVIES, television shows, retro fashion trends, piquant musical quotations, and thickly clouded memories have left us with a crowded vision of Prohibition drinking: a montage of raccoon coats, rolled-up stockings, bobbed hair, and cloche hats, the entire tableau surmounted by a totemic hip flask in shimmering silver. Two elements are missing from this picture: pain and desperation.
These were ushered in by a jolt of greed. Derelicts were poisoning themselves before Prohibition with alcohol of less than vintage quality—Sterno filtered through a sock, for instance, or diluted antifreeze solution (“addicts claimed that a little rust improved the flavor and gave their bodies needed iron,” wrote Herbert Asbury). But Prohibition stimulated the avarice of low-grade bootleggers, who extended their inventory of repurposed industrial alcohol with the addition of wood alcohol, isopropyl alcohol, and other toxic compounds, turning reports of paralysis and death into a newspaper staple (from the New York World, January 1, 1927: FOUR NEW RUM DEATHS; 20 MORE TO BELLEVUE; 760 DIE HERE IN YEAR). An operation based in Buffalo distributed its goods twice weekly in one-gallon cans—the delivery truck “called like a milkman,” a customer said—and what might normally cause a headache if properly diluted would almost certainly produce blindness if not; tests found that the stuff in the cans was 38 percent wood alcohol.* A two-ounce bottle of “Jamaican Ginger,” aka “Jake,” could be had for as little as thirty-five cents. Up to 80 percent pure alcohol, it was enough to create a little buzz at first—but in one horrifying instance, a contaminated batch permanently crippled five hundred people in Wichita alone. The poison Jake, which came from a distilling operation that had carelessly added a potent neurotoxin called tri-ortho-cresyl phosphate, attacked the nerves in the hands and feet, giving victims an odd, shuffling gait that became known as “Jake Walk” or “Jake Leg.” One of the several blues songs spawned by the Jake Leg epidemic explained a further complication:
It’s the doggonest disease
Ever heard of since I been born
You get numb in front of your body,
You can’t carry any lovin’ on.
Just like the cinematic cocktail parties and speakeasies that Clarence Brown invoked to “reflect American life,” poisonous alcohol made it into the movies, too. In one of Brown’s films, 1925’s The Goose Woman, Louise Dresser plays a fallen opera star who satisfies her alcoholism with hair tonic. But the songs and films and other cultural expressions of the poison epidemic didn’t necessarily make people pay heed. It was as if the perils of poisonous liquor made the less toxic, more conventional stuff seem positively healthful. Once the first few years of Prohibition had passed and tipplers and tasters realized the earth had not stopped in its orbit, arrests for public intoxication and drunk drivin
g soared. So did cirrhosis deaths and hospitalizations for alcoholic psychosis. After one factored in the unquestionably large numbers of nondrinkers—either sworn teetotalers or obliging law-abiders—it was clear that the rate of per capita consumption among those who did drink resembled a fever chart.
Strikingly, this seemed particularly true among the well off and the well educated. The student council of Marymount College, a Catholic women’s school in New York, declared that “over-indulgence is to be found among the wealthy rather than the poorer classes.” British visitors expressed shock at the amount of drinking they encountered among their hosts; one, newspaper publisher Sir Charles Igglesden, described seeing “men swallow four or five cocktails” before dinner, “drinking against time, as it were.” In a genial letter to her ex-husband, the former Mrs. Andrew Mellon wrote, “I find that people expect more [liquor] at a dinner party than before Prohibition.” (She also sought advice on how to move a case of bootleg Scotch from Newport to her winter home—if the secretary of the treasury didn’t know how to do that, who would?) A Vanity Fair story by Clare Boothe Brokaw secured the catchphrase “Have a little drinkie” in the argot of the rich. To Brokaw drinking was “the greatest anodyne for that most intense of all social and human agonies—boredom.”
Such stylish insouciance guaranteed that excess was the mode, especially (and unsurprisingly) among the young, who were following the example of their elders. “The girls simply won’t go out with the boys who haven’t got flasks to offer,” said the police chief of Topeka, Kansas. His counterpart in Boise, Idaho, commenting on the behavior of young people in his jurisdiction, said, “Drinking is done almost everywhere, by almost everybody.” Jean Hamilton, dean of women at the University of Michigan, filled her out-box with letters to parents whose daughters overindulged. “For a girl to place herself as completely at a man’s mercy as to be helplessly intoxicated is very serious,” Hamilton wrote to the parents of a sophomore named Pauline Izor. Izor had been so drunk “that she fell twice and was unable to get up by herself.”
The case of Pauline Izor was neither especially extreme nor especially rare. What gives it enduring relevance is the unexceptional remainder of her story. She married a physician, raised a family, and eventually returned to Ann Arbor four decades later as housemother at a Michigan sorority. Looking at her picture in an old yearbook, one sees a handsome woman of sixty or so in a light-colored dress with a scalloped neckline, pearl earrings decorously accenting her coiffed hair. She’s sitting in the center of four rows of smiling young women in identical white blouses; as housemother, she is effectively their full-time chaperone. It may be automatic to read the word “speakeasy” and picture in the mind’s eye a generic nineteen-year-old flapper, cloche on her head, flask in her hand, kicking up her happy heels in a buoyant Charleston. But to look at Pauline Izor at sixty—or at a photograph of one’s own mother or grandmother—and to try to imagine her as a falling-down drunk is unfathomable. From the distance of eight decades, the mind’s eye easily projects the image of gaiety we’ve been bequeathed by the tribunes of popular culture. But we can no sooner conjure the image of our grandmothers teetering on the edge of alcohol poisoning than we can imagine them robbing banks; it won’t compute.
Consequently, a three-dimensional sense of the excesses of Prohibition-era drinking, especially among the young, can be found only in darker corners. At Dartmouth College, a junior named Robert T. Meads was sentenced to twenty years’ hard labor in the state penitentiary for having shot and killed senior Henry E. Maroney in a dispute over payment for bootlegged liquor. Summer resorts in Pennsylvania saw the rise of “Fatty Arbuckle parties,” which aspired to emulate the notorious San Francisco bacchanal that had led to the death of showgirl Virginia Rappe.* And although criminal behavior or tragic consequences were not ubiquitous components of the alcoholic excess of the period, desperation definitely was. Nowhere was this more clearly memorialized than in a simple declarative sentence in John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra, where he describes a typical evening among the young married couples at the Lantenengo Country Club of Gibbsville, Pennsylvania: “There were innumerable vomitings, more or less disastrous.”
HER HORROR AT EXCESSIVE among the young that would eventually shape the life of Pauline Morton Sabin. It was some life: Sabin was the daughter of Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of the navy; heiress to the Morton Salt fortune; wife of a J. P. Morgan partner; first woman member of the Republican National Committee; and chatelaine of Bayberry Land, a twenty-eight-room home on 298 acres in Southampton, New York, and The Oaks, a 1,961-acre plantation in Goose Creek, South Carolina. She had supported Prohibition from the beginning, believing “a world without liquor would be a beautiful thing” and fondly imagining that her two boys would grow up in a dryer, safer, and generally better country. But Sabin saw the beautiful thing turn ugly.
“Girls of a generation ago would not have ventured into a saloon,” she would write. “Girls did not drink; it was not considered ‘nice.’ But today girls and boys drink, at parties and everywhere, then stop casually at a speakeasy on the way home.” This fretful comment appeared in a widely distributed pamphlet entitled “Why American Mothers Demand Repeal.” To Sabin and the other women who would eventually join her crusade to end Prohibition—an effort that would make her the Wayne Wheeler of Repeal—the revolution that had brought the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act into being had not put an end to excessive drinking but had fostered it.
The law said one thing; the young people Sabin knew ignored it. Prohibition, she believed, had become “an attempt to enthrone hypocrisy as the dominant force in this country.” Nothing, it appeared, could stanch the flood of alcohol that washed the country from coast to coast—or the political dishonesty, cultural dislocations, and contagion of crime that rode in its wake.
* Hemingway’s expatriate characters do not hide their distaste for Prohibition or for those responsible for it. When Jake Barnes and Bill Gorton take their extended, wine-soaked fishing trip, they fall into a sardonic colloquy, each claiming acquaintanceship with Wayne Wheeler. When Jake finally says, “The saloon must go,” Bill replies, “The saloon must go, and I will take it with me.”
* The idiom continued to evolve in Ireland, courtesy of James Joyce. From Ulysses, published in 1922: “’Tis, sure. What say? In the speakeasy. Tight. I shee you, shir.”
* Literary scholar Kathleen Drowne writes that the term “blind pig” and its regional variants were rooted in Maine, where a nineteenth-century tavern owner “sold his patrons tickets to view a blind pig he kept in the back room. Along with admission, every viewing customer was treated to a free glass of rum.”
* The phrase “blind drunk” derives from the capacity of wood alcohol to attack the optic nerve and destroy retinal cells.
* After three trials, motion picture comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was eventually acquitted of any responsibility in Rappe’s death, but his acting career was destroyed.
PART III
THE WAR OF
THE WET AND
THE DRY
“The thing that sticks out clearly now is that for years our politics promises to be thoroughly saturated with this wet and dry stuff. It will warp the whole political fabric, prevent clear thinking—even by those who are capable of thinking clearly—and hide the merits of the men who run for office in a fog of feeling.”
—Frank Kent, Baltimore Sun, quoted in an
Anti-Saloon League reprint, circa 1922
Chapter 15
Open Wounds
P
AULINE SABIN WAS in Paris when Warren Harding died. The president’s long-planned trip to the American West in the summer of 1923 had first made headlines in Denver in late June, when he delivered an uncharacteristically strong appeal for aggressive Prohibition enforcement. Even more surprising, it was on this same trip that he finally decided to stop drinking, a determination induced by the importunate pleadings of his wife, Florence, and his hovering conscience
, namely Wayne Wheeler. When Harding suffered his fatal stroke in San Francisco on August 2, details of the Teapot Dome conspiracy and the other scandals that would forever soil Harding’s reputation had not yet become fully known. In her suite at the Crillon—the same suite, overlooking the Place de la Concorde, where David Lloyd George had lived during the Paris Peace Talks—Sabin wrote in her diary, “In his simple way Harding had many qualities which almost made him a great man.” Her friend Alice Roosevelt Longworth was more temperate in her appraisal. “Harding was not a bad man,” she said. “He was just a slob.”
No one could mistake Calvin Coolidge for a slob—or for a great man. Longworth said the Coolidge White House and the Harding White House were as different “as a New England front parlor is from the backroom of a speakeasy.” Coolidge was unlike his predecessor in nearly every way, skeptical where Harding was credulous, cautious where Harding was impetuous, circumspect where Harding was loquacious. Only in one key respect were the two presidents similar: even considering Harding’s belated conversion in Denver, neither man was particularly interested in enforcing Prohibition. In Coolidge’s case this was consistent with his general position on the role of government. “If the federal government should go out of existence,” he said, “the common run of people would not detect the difference in the affairs of their daily life for a considerable length of time.” It was as if he viewed government as a vestigial organ of the body politic. The president’s inclination toward inactivity, wrote Walter Lippmann, “is far from being indolent inactivity. It is a grim, determined, alert inactivity.”
Coolidge’s reluctance to strengthen Prohibition enforcement was sharpened by other impulses besides his devotion to stasis. He believed that government should keep its nose out of the lives of citizens. He so hated to spend federal money that in 1926, with the economy in the midst of a spectacular boom, he whacked the Prohibition Bureau’s budget by 3.5 percent. And though there’s every reason to believe he remained personally dry during his years in the White House, he was not a stranger to beer or wine in the years before and after. (In 1930, on finishing his second glass of a fine Tokay that William Randolph Hearst had offered him, a delighted Coolidge declared, “I must remember this!”) Apart from his support for an expanded Coast Guard, Coolidge’s most visible effort in behalf of Prohibition occurred at a state dinner in Havana, when he toasted Cuban president Gerardo Machado with a glass of water. His solution to all the vexing problems brought on by the Volstead Act and its profligate violation was either foolishly naïve or a conscious evasion: if people would only stop buying from bootleggers, he told a governors’ conference in 1923, “the rest would be easy.”
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Page 30